Beaufort Sea Zooplankton (CASES) 2003-2004

This dataset will serve to describe the overwintering dynamics of zooplankton in Franklin bay, southern Beaufort Sea. The CASES (Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study) overwintering station was sampled at weekly intervals from 9 December 2003 to 29 May 2004. Zooplankton were collected with a multi sampler Hydrobios® equipped with nine nets of 200 μm mesh size each that was deployed from the moonpool of the CCG scientific icebreaker Amundsen. The surface first 10 meters of the water column enclosed in the moonpool were not sampled. A total of 61 zooplankton species/taxa were identified. Copepodite stages of the copepods Oncaea borealis, Oithona similis, Metridia longa, Microcalanus pygmaeus, Calanus glacialis, Pseudocalanus sp., Calanus hyperboreus, and Cyclopina sp. numerically dominated the zooplankton assemblages, as previously observed in the region in 2002. Cnidarians, chaetognaths and gastropods were also abundant. This dataset will be updated periodically during 2007 with subsequent analysis of the CASES-sample series. The information will be used to calibrate a NPZD model (Nutrient-Phytoplankton-Zooplankton-Detritus) of southern Beaufort Sea. Another objective is to validate acoustic and video plankton recorder data by comparison with direct evaluation of zooplankton composition and distribution. Researchers using sediment traps moored in the region to study carbon flux are also interested in information on zooplankton composition and vertical distribution. This database has 61 unique species entries and consists of 4208 records; it is less than 2MB in size. Processing of the remaining samples is in progress and the database will be updated in the course of 2007